iGEM UNAH 2015 is the first fully Honduran team to participate in a synthetic biology competition. We are dealing with a major health issue that affects the lives of a high percentage of people living in tropical and subtropical regions, including Latin America. It is our responsibility to spread knowledge about synthetic biology through our community and increase public outreach and awareness. In order to achieve this, we used three different strategies, the first one consisted in giving talks in different schools with the purpose to introduce our project and the advances of Synthetic Biology made in our country; second strategy consisted on the elaboration of a poll which purpose to evaluate the level of knowledge about Biotechnology of the general population; third strategy was to take advantage of media and disseminate our project through interviews and reports. Now we will proceed to perform a more detailed analysis of the strategies previously mentioned.
LECTURES
In Honduras, there is an enormous amount of student population with great potential, but due to lack of good organization in the education system, lack of resources or the isolation some schools suffer from, a great amount of the student population, either drops out of school or does not realize the accomplishments their major studies can provide. For these reasons, the iGEM UNAH 2015 Team emphasized the need to design a new strategy that allows young people to get informed about the new development of sciences in our country, to think out of the box when planning on their future studies, and how they can participate on major international events like IGEM.
The strategy we adopted was of giving talks in different education centers in and out of Tegucigalpa, the capital city. There are four education levels in Honduras, pre-school, middle school, high school and university. The iGEM UNAH 2015 Team decided that the best way to accomplish our objective was to focus on teenagers attending high school and college freshmen because it is here where the integral training of teens is attended. High school continues the process of formation from middle school, it qualifies teenagers for the execution of determined professions and jobs that the economic and social development of the country requires and prepares them to continue with their higher studies, which are oriented to form professionals able to promulgate and produce science, technology and culture in the creation and application of knowledge according to the demands and expectations of the country (Secretary of Education of Honduras, 2003).
The talks given in schools and universities had the common objective of encouraging young people to expand their horizons and make them realize the great potential they possess. To try and emphasize what was previously mentioned, our talks basically consisted on the development of the new sciences in Honduras (in this case Synthetic Biology), and how young people can participate in the development of such (giving our project as an example).
Part of the team attended high schools, public and private, where students showed great interest on what was shown to them and did not give a second thought about asking questions, not just about the project itself but about study opportunities in careers that could have important social implications in our country.
The talks given in universities were equally satisfactory. Part of the team attended different regional university centers in different parts of the country and most of the talks were given to students from the health area. The talks were similar to the ones given in high schools but with an emphasis in the social context that new sciences possess and how they could be a part of them.
